335,983 research outputs found
Quality Costs : Facilitating The Quality Initiative
Ideas of what constitute quality costs have been changing rapidly. Whereas only a few years ago the costs of quality (COQ) were perceived as the cost of running the quality assurance department and the laboratory plus scrap and warranty costs, it is now widely accepted that they are the costs incurred in designing, implementing, operating, and maintaining quality management systems, the costs involved in introducing and sustaining a process of continuous and company — wide quality improvement, plus the costs incurred owing to failures of the systems, products and/or services. There is a general consensus that quality dollars expended on prevention and appraisal costs have the greatest return, and organizations spend the largest percentage of quality dollars in these categories. The remaining categories, failure costs (both internal and external), should ideally constitute only a minor percentage of total dollars spent on quality. The remaining category, failure costs (both internal and external), should ideally constitute only a minor percentage of total dollars spent on quality. Contrary to expectations, in many organizations, the highest percentage of the quality dollar is spent on the category with the lowest return, internal and external failures, followed by appraisal costs. Finally prevention costs, which produce the greatest return on investment, typically receive only a little share of the quality dollar
Costs of quality or quality costs
Costs of quality or quality costs do not mean the use of expensive or very highly quality materials to manufacture a product. The term refers to the costs that are incurred to prevent, detect and remove defects from products. There are four categories: internal failure costs (costs associated with defects found before the customer receives the product or service), external failure costs (costs associated with defects found after the customer receives the product or service), appraisal costs (costs incurred to determine the degree of conformance to quality requirements) and prevention costs (costs incurred to keep failure and appraisal costs to a minimum). Cost of quality is a methodology that allows an organization to determine the extent to which its resources are used for activities that prevent poor quality, that appraise the quality of the organization's products or services, and that result from internal and external failures. Having such information allows an organization to determine the potential savings to be gained by implementing process improvements.Web of Science5213
The Quality Costs
Quality has a cost and this fact cannot be denied. In the same time, it is true that non-quality is more expensive. Quality is considered as being expensive because no one tries to calculate non-quality costs. Out of the final cost of a product, non-quality stands for 20% up to 35%. According to this idea all the economic sectors contain error costs caused by the mistakes made during the production process. To have a real consummation situation, it is necessary to know the cost quantum. The final quality cost is the result of the following costs: prevention costs, necessary to preclude errors; evaluation costs, as results of a final product evaluation, and failure costs, generated by the non – attainment of product’s purpose. The gross of these costs stand for the total quality costs. Nowadays, the problem inheres in how much this quality cost represents out of the final cost.Total Quality Management, quality cost, prevention costs
Will Privatization Reduce Costs?
I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than public employees. However, if quality cannot be perfectly measured, providing a private firm with incentives to improve quality forces the owner of the firm to bear risk. As a result, private firms will always be cheaper for low levels of quality but might be more expensive for high levels of quality. Extending the model to allow for differences in task attractiveness, I find that public firms shun unattractive tasks, whereas private firms undertake them if incentives are strong enough.Privatization; Public Sector Contracting; Incomplete Contracts; Contracting Out
Candidate Quality
We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high.Politicians' competence; Career concerns; Campaigning costs; Rewards for elected officials; Citizen-candidate models
Will Privatization Reduce Costs?
I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than public employees. However, if quality cannot be perfectly measured, providing a private firm with incentives to improve quality forces the owner of the firm to bear risk. As a result, private firms will always be cheaper for low levels of quality but might be more expensive for high levels of quality. Extending the model to allow for differences in task attractiveness, I find that public firms shun unattractive tasks, whereas private firms undertake them if incentives are strong enough.Privatization; public sector contracting; incomplete contracts; contracting out
Correlation between prescribing quality and pharmaceutical costs in English primary care: national cross-sectional analysis
Background Both pharmaceutical costs and quality-indicator performance vary substantially between general practices, but little is known about the relationship between prescribing costs and quality Aim To measure the association between prescribing quality and pharmaceutical costs among English general practices Design and setting Cross-sectional observational study using data from the Quality and Outcomes Framework and the Prescribing Analysis and Cost database from all 8409 general practices in England in 2005-2006 Method Correlation between practice achievement of 26 prescribing quality indicators in eight prescribing areas and related pharmaceutical costs was examined. Results There was no significant association between the overall achievement of quality indicators and related pharmaceutical costs (P= 0.399). Mean achievement of quality indicators across all eight prescribing areas was 79.0% (standard deviation 4.4%). There were small positive correlations in five prescribing areas: influenza vaccination, beta blockers, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, lipid lowering, and antiplatelet treatment (all
Heterogeneous quality firms and trade costs
There is increasing empirical evidence that vertical product differentiation is an important determinant of international trade. However, the economic literature so far has solely focused on the case in which quality trade stems from differences between countries. No studies investigate the role of quality trade between similar economies. This paper first develops a simple theoretical trade model that includes vertical product differentiation in a heterogeneous-firm framework. The model yields three main predictions for trade between similar economies. First, exported goods are of higher quality than goods sold on the domestic market. Second, larger economies have on average higher export qualities compared with smaller economies. Third, with increasing trade costs higher quality goods are exchanged. For all three effects, strong empirical support is found using detailed export trade data of the United States and 15 European Union countries.Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Common Carriers Industry,Free Trade,Transport and Trade Logistics
Candidate Quality
We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high. The model accommodates a variety of extensions of which we study costly primaries, two-stage signalling, and ideological differences.politicians’ competence, career concerns, campaigning costs, rewards for elected officials; citizen-candidate models
The Costs and Benefits of Forensics
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that states can be laboratories for experimentation in law and policy. Disappointingly, however, the actual laboratories that states and local governments run are not a home for experimentation. We do not have adequate information about either the costs or the benefits of forensic testing or allocation of resources. Increased spending and expansion of crime laboratories has perversely accompanied growing backlogs. Poor quality control has resulted in a series of audits and even closures of crime laboratories. In response to these problems, however, some laboratories and some entire states have developed new approaches toward oversight. In this Article, I will describe the growth of crime labs and the resources dedicated to them, but also the backlogs that have resulted from far too much in the way of quantity. Second, I will discuss the problem of resource allocation in forensics, including the differing perspectives and interests of police and forensic agencies that should both be taken into account. Third, I will describe quality control challenges that have accompanied the explosion in the use of forensics. Fourth, I will describe how regulation could better address both resource allocation and quality control, as well as how the Houston Forensic Science Center has become a model for regulating both the quality and the quantity of forensics. Finally, I will ask why the federal government has not done more to help improve the quality of forensics even as it has helped to encourage overwhelming and unnecessary quantity
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